Dual boot with boot manager on CD

[rolandersson]

I want to use two windows xp sessions with different setups. One
session should be hidden to the ordinary user and only be accessible
for me.
I plan to make two primary partitions and only one of the can be
active. I do not want to have a boot manager on the HDD. Is it possible
to have the bootmanager on a CD from which I can choose the WinXP
session, and without this CD the default WinXP will boot?

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

No - you need the boot manager on the hard disk.

--


Will Denny
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Please reply to the News Groups

 

[rolandersson]

It seems that the Gujin boot manager can reside on a CD, but does not
have support for NTFS. Why is it not possible?

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

Gujin is MS-DOS based - ergo, it will work with a FAT32 hard disk/partition,
but not with an NTFS one. Gujin won't be able to 'see' the NTFS hard
disk/partition.

--


Will Denny
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Please reply to the News Groups

 

[rolandersson]

You misunderstood. I understand that Gujin does not have support for
NTFS. But you say it is not possible at all. If Gujin can do it with
FAT32 there may be another boot loader that can do it with NTFS.

 

[Etienne]

Gujin is MS-DOS based - ergo, it will work with a FAT32 hard disk/partition,
but not with an NTFS one. Gujin won't be able to 'see' the NTFS hard
disk/partition.

No, Gujin isn't based on MSDOS at all, it is only based on PC BIOS.
There is a system loader called "tiny.exe" or "boot.exe" to load a
kernel, but Rolandersson was talking about the bootloader which is
running directly from the MBR or El-torito bootable CDROM.
Gujin only understand FAT12/16/32, ISO9660 and EXT2/3 filesystems, but
it detects all partitions, to boot a Windows partition you do not need
to access files inside that partition.
Rolandersson proposed to put Gujin on a CDROM, which is a read only
device - Gujin needs to be able to write to disks to hide/unhide
partitions - that may or may not be a problem (If it works with a
floppy disk or a USB key but not a CDROM then it worth a Forum message
on http://gujin.org ).
Another potential problem is the coexistance of two Windows XP
partitions on the same hard disk - it may not work as nicely as
Windows98/Me (copying a primary partition containing Win98/Me into an
extended partition of the same size and running any of those) - and
then there may be License problems.